Speaking to Games Industry International, executive producer Mark Rubin spoke about the competition between Call of Duty and Battlefield – which begins again this year with the release of Call of Duty: Ghosts and Battlefield 4 – stating that it’s more about pushing each other in the same direction to be more successful.
“It’s less antagonistic, from a developer’s side – sure marketing and stuff is all [about that] but on a developer’s side it’s like, ‘Oh, did you see that stuff they’re doing? That’s so cool!’ We could do something that’s like this and that and we get excited about seeing that kind of stuff. So from a developer’s side, it definitely pushes us [to do better].
“But it pushes us in a – I don’t know if other studios feel this way – but I hope in a sort of camaraderie type sense. ‘Oh, those guys are doing awesome stuff. Let’s jack up our game.’ But not like two opposing teams. Rather, like the same team pushing in the same direction,” he explained.
“We all want gaming, in general to be awesome, because if gaming isn’t good, then we all lose our jobs in a sense. So for us, I think that the intellectual realization is we want everyone to be successful because if gaming is successful then we’re all successful.”
Of course, being successful with its games doesn’t make Infinity Ward complacent. As Rubin states, “Every year, every time we made a new one it was the same thing [in terms of competition], and I like that. I think that’s the part that keeps us hungry, that keeps us… we don’t want to feel like the top dog, necessarily.
“We want to feel like it’s a struggle every time. We want to feel that almost ‘Rocky moment’, which is kind of a weird thing to say, but we do want to feel like that. We want to feel like we’ve got a huge challenge in front of us. We can’t just phone this in and ship a game and expect it to sell. We actually really have to do harder work this year than we did last year.”
Call of Duty: Ghosts releases on November 5 worldwide while Battlefield 4 will be out on October 29th in North America.